Special editions

Bending space

Via Fubiz

100+ Years of Design Manifestos

A Designer is not only a creative maker. A Designer has always been a creative thinker, a creative changer. A Designer isn't just a worker - a Designer is a believer, a fighter, a transformer.

Design and designers have ever since worked to improve and/or transform society in many areas, and many Manifestos have been written in order to express their (our) principles, ideas and proposals.

Social Design Notes presents a list of theses manifestos from William Morris (1883) until today.

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Um Designer não é só um fazedor criativo. Um Designer sempre foi um pensador criativo, um criativo de mudança. Um Designer não é só um trabalhador - um Designer é um crente, um lutador, um transformador.

O Design e os designers têm desde sempre lutado para melhorar e /ou transformar a sociedade nas mais diversas áreas, e muitos Manifestos têm sido escritos demonstrando os seus (nossos) princípios, ideias e propostas.

Social Design Notes apresenta uma lista desses manifestos desde William Morris (1883) até os dias de hoje.

via Design / Consumo Ecológico

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Building museums and a fresh Arab identity

The New York Times has a most interesting work about Abu Dhabi and Qatar building museums to recast their national identities.

Read Nicolai Ouroussoff's "Critic's Notebook"

and link here to watch the interviews of architects I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel.

Jean Nouvel, Louvre Abu Dhabi

Norman Foster, Abu Dhabi National Museum

I.M. Pei, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

Zaha Hadid, Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

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The 7 Rules to understand Design & Designers

By designer Fabien Barral, available here.

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Where good ideas come from

Four-minute version presentation made by Cognitive Media

for the book "Where Good Ideas Come From" written by Steven Johnson.

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LEGO Build Anything

Build Anything from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

"This is a short advert I made for Lego. It uses pieces from the stash my brother and I used to play with when we were younger, so perhaps it looks a bit dated compared with modern day Lego. Dated, but still great."

Music and Film by Temujin Doran

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Pink Nounou

"O fantástico não está fora do real,
mas no sítio do real que de tão visível não se vê"
Vergílio Ferreira


Pink Nounou é como uma floresta mágica. É um local fantástico onde o mundo dos sonhos toma o lugar que lhe cabe por direito. E está mesmo à nossa frente. Entramos para lá do caminho de tijolos amarelos e encontramos bonecos que nos encantam, fazendo-nos regressar à beleza da inocência, ao florir da felicidade, ao suave abraço das manhãs que antecedem o verão.
Pink Nounou é um maravilhoso universo criativo da designer Ana Fernandes, que muito me alegra ter como muito estimada amiga de longa data.
Entrem neste mundo novo, há muito mais para conhecer.



Pink Nounou is just like a magic forest. It's a fantastic land where the world of dreams takes its rightful place. And it stands right in front of us. We go beyond the yellow brick road and find these charming loving dolls that take us back to the beauty of innocence, to the blossom of happiness, into the gentle embrace of those mornings before summer.
Pink Nounou is a wonderful creative universe by designer Ana Fernandes, who I gladly have as a long dearing friend.
Walk into this new world, there's much more to come.

A normal day in 2014

TAT The Astonishing Tribe

via The Hidden Persuader

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Objectified

"Objectified" is a remarkable documentary about our relationship with objects, its design, their designers and the design process. A glance at creativity and function, observation and environment, expression and emotion, identity and consumption.

Interviews with Paola Antonelli (MoMA), Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich), Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Jonathan Ive (Apple), David Kelley and Bill Moggridge (IDEO), Marc Newson (London/Paris), Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine), and many others

Produced and directed by Gary Hustwit, "Objectified" is the second part of a three-film “design trilogy”, being the first one "Helvetica".

Helvetica

I too became a Helvetica lover. It's so incredibly simple, so well designed with equilibrium and expression, making it an extraordinary and beautiful worldwide used typeface. In 2007, celebrating its 50th anniversary, Gary Hustwit made "Helvetica", a documentary about this typeface so close to us and so embedded in our daily lives. It's a look about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.
Interviews with Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Alfred Hoffmann, Bruno Steinert, Otmar Hoefer, and many more.

"The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day. The film was shot in high-definition on location in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium."

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Cartoon Network

Work by Brand New School

(Via BrandNew)

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London Cycle Hire

Mayor of London website
Barclays Cycle Hire website

Afghan Women and the return of the Taliban

Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban

An astonishing look by TIME of the brutal reality of the Taliban, that despite the war effort still remains a daily menace towards Afghan women. And the amazing Aisha photographed by Jodi Bieber.

Cities for tomorrow

Being our cities living forms, their shaping has often changed them into non-friendly areas. Many of us feel and live the many mistakes made, shifting the true idea of community and balance. Cities should be for people, not just for cars and money. The way so many citizens badly live are bound to the way their towns and cities are wrongly built among bad planning and no strategy that brings inadequate solutions of housing and traffic, and therefore a society daily stressed in messy polluted urbanity with problematic social issues.
Obviously not every town or city is a problem, but the different levels of growth and policies has produced many questions of what and how the way we should live in the future.
Every year the world population is gathered more and more into urban communities. Trying to fix the problems existing today from this intense migration, new ideas of thinking and achieving better solutions for the creation of a new paradigm of living and working together in such a space is essential.
The dynamics of this large structure can be designed with projects that respect people and land, following principles of conceptual planning, equilibrium and fairness. In effect, with the purpose of designing for the common good, cities must be much more than places to sleep and work, they must be true places of life, of play, of nature. They can be energetic and biologically sustainable, and upon technological solutions already at reach. Cities can become spaces of interaction and human integration built with urban planning and policies that may be seen as utopian but are achievable with the right ideas and actions.
We must envision a society that can change and be changed, not for the sake of some sinister ideology but by the undeniable fact that as humans coexisting with one another and the nature around us, we have the power to enhance our quality of life, we have to ensure ways of preserving our memory and expanding to a brighter future, we can make a better and sustainable development for all. Creativity and strategic objectives can make us better citizens. The cities for tomorrow are already in planning.

See here, featured by Newsweek magazine, three remarkable visions imagined for New York and Los Angeles in 2030.

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Rest in fantasy

Fantasy coffins from Ghana, West Africa

A 50 year-old tradition of pure imagination and folklore design.

Caixões fantasiosos do Gana, costa ocidental africana

Uma tradição com apenas cinquenta anos, pleno de imaginação e design popular.

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Como fazer sucesso nas agências

book covers

Adoro livros. Adoro design de capas.

A colecção do Público "Livros que Mudaram o Mundo" tem contudo más capas. Assim, fiz algumas capas do que considero mais adequado (e atraente) ao título de cada livro. E com uma estrutura de colecção entre o clássico e o moderno, recorrendo à fonte Helvética, a formas e imagens, defini cores para cada temática: cyan-Ciências, púrpura-Política, verde-Religião, laranja-Ficção, vermelho-Social.
Uma vez impressas cada livro tem em minha casa uma sobrecapa que valoriza muito mais os conteudos.

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I love books. I love book cover designs.

The collection from Público newspaper "Books that Changed the World" that I've been buying has, however, bad covers. So, I made some new ones more accurate and appealing. And with a structure between classic and modern, supported on Helvetica, shapes and images, I defined colours to each subject: cyan for Science, purple for Politics, green for Religion, orange for Fiction and red for Social issues.

Once printed each book I own on my bookshelf gains an over-cover with much more personality and value.

Brasília 50

Brasília 50 anos
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Finland pavilion Shanghai 2010

Finland pavilion Kirnu designed by JKMM Architects for Shanghai Expo 2010.

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